Seems we are stuck with the Mi Box (iffy reviews) and the Shield (expensive if you only want the Android TV use).
I'm hoping Google will come through, but I doubt it. Is there any other companies working on box? Is there anything to look forward to with Android TV outside of OEMs shipping with it built in?
Google really isn't in the consumer hardware business, especially in set top boxes, where Roku controls like 70% of the market, and Amazon the rest. They'd rather farm it out and give a stamp of approval. There's still a handful of lesser known android TV boxes out there that are better than Mi Box and cheaper than shield, but they only sell like 10k boxes before mostly disappearing. Google is more interested in being a TV OS, than a STB OS. There's no money in being a STB OS, and outside of some power users or enthusaists (such as people on this sub) an android TV box is generally not as good a "general consumer" option as a Roku or Amazon fire.
Doubt it wal mart is bringing out the ematic jetstream will have the same internals as mibox with more ports i.e Usb ethernet ect
I wish for an Android TV device thats in between MiBox and Shield, but with an MPEG2 hardware decoder. Why? because the Raspberry Pi has one, it cost $2 to enable it and when paired up with LibreELEC (Kodi) it plays channels off my HDHomerun Prime flawlessly each and every time. Its going to be years before they switch to ATSC 3.0 (which does away with MPEG2 for broadcast) and if people want DVR options, its best to have a hardware encoder.
Software rendering, great if you have a quad core x86 i5 or better, not so much if its quad core celeron (most commonly found in media players).
I keep wondering if a Pixel Box is on the horizon but I think they're just letting 3rd party products have the spotlight for now.
They have, and I believe it's called the Nexus TV, but they ended support for it and supposedly the latest official update makes it so slow that people have resorted to installing another ROM onto it.
There's the Channel Master Stream+ that runs Android TV and features an antenna DVR if you attach a hard drive. It's new and doesn't have Netflix, Prime or Direct TV yet. I side loaded Prime and it works well.
Google is overextended. That is why you see them releasing things with the same functionality then abandoning them a year or two later. Google's attention span isn't there for a good hardware release.